Megan Ansdell
NOTE: this website is no longer regularly maintained. See my current NASA bio here.
⭐️ I'm an astrophysicist who likes data/ML + policy/programs and is currently a Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in DC. All views on this website are my own.
🤓 In previously lives, I was a Flatiron Research Fellow in NYC applying ML to astro, a CIPS Fellow at UC Berkeley studying baby exoplanets (ok ok basically dust), and an astro grad student at the IfA in Hawaii whose thesis with Jonathan Williams won the IAU PhD Prize for Planetary Science.
🚀 Before all that, I got a Masters in International Science & Technology Policy from GWU's Space Policy Institute in DC, where I geeked out on planning international cooperation in space exploration. That interest in space policy was sparked while doing a Masters in Space Studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg. Yeah, I was in school for a while.
Media / Press:
FileCoin Foundation panel (Jan. 2023) at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on decentralization for Open Science
Google Cloud Next '19 talk (Apr. 2019) in San Francisco highlighting the role of Google Cloud Platform in exoplanet & astrobiology research
Research Highlight in Nature Astronomy (Jan. 2019) for my paper on potential star-grazing exocomets
AAS Nova article (Dec. 2018) for my paper on using deep learning for exoplanet transit science
Reddit AMA (Oct. 2018) for NASA FDL + Google Cloud on using deep learning for exoplanet transit science
Space.com article (June 2018) that interviewed me for my research on language protocols for human spaceflight missions